A
senior project by three mechanical engineering students recently
triumphed in the prestigious mechanical design contest of the James
F. Lincoln Arc Welding Foundation, taking the first-place gold award
in the undergraduate competition. Susan O’Grady, Tina Leong
and Wutichai Chanhong designed and built an orthotic device to assist
people with muscular disabilities bend and lift their knees.

“As
undergraduate engineering awards go, you can’t do
much better than the Lincoln award,” said faculty adviser and
engineering equipment technician Michael Strange, who worked with the
students. The project was supervised by engineering professors
Mamdouh Abo-El-Ata, Michael Holden and Dipendra Sinha.

The “Walkomatic Therapy” device, designed to amplify the
wearer’s momentum, is made up of four components including a
brace that the user wears, an insole foot sensor that acknowledges
the user’s need to bend or lift the knee, and a microcontroller
that signals the brace to bend and take on weight pressure. The fourth
component, an actuator that provides the power, was the only component
not designed and built by the students. Past attempts by other universities,
including Stanford, to engineer such a device were limited to the design
of the brace.

The project took two semesters to complete, and the students were
determined to complete the assignment with a workable and affordable
device.

O’Grady,
Leong and Chanhong estimate that their entire system could sell for
as little as $5,000 to $6,000.

“This wasn’t just a case of students taking their senior
assignment seriously,” Strange said. “They took the project
to heart.”

“We all liked the idea of taking on the project as a humanitarian
effort,” O’Grady said. “We wanted to help people
with disabilities become more physically active.”

O’Grady
acknowledged that as soon as the team realized how much they had
committed to do, they were “pretty stressed out. But
the idea of working on something that brought to light such a good
thing is what kept us going.”